PRONOUN MIXUPS: ANOTHER AI TRANSLATION SPECIALTY

 

By Carlos de Paula

 

It does not take much to realize that not all languages are similar. Sounds, alphabets, intonations are just some of the obvious differences between Russian and Chinese, for instance. But there is much more than that, much feared grammar. Some languages have articles, others don’t, some have declensions, many do not, several have tons of verb tenses, others have simple verb structures, so on, so forth. One area where AI translation often messes up is personal pronouns.

 

Take for instance Portuguese and Spanish, two languages where AI wreaks real havoc in the pronoun area.   

 

I have handled many AI edits to and from these languages, and AI makes a real mess of things, which can be troublesome in litigation documents, for instance. AI does have a problem reading context and seems to regard the use of gender in Romance languages a futile nuisance. This can even cause legal issues, when pronouns are wrongly translated and seem to identify the incorrect party. The longer the text, the worst the problem.

 

That is why a professional, experienced and thorough editor should be retained to edit any text translated by AI.

 

Carlos de Paula is one of the top Brazilian Portuguese translators in the USA since 1982. And now a top Portuguese and Spanish AI Translation editor as well. 

For information on translations of Prenuptial agreements visit http://prenuptranslations.com

 

TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING

By Carlos de Paula

 

Most translation done in the United States involves European languages whose alphabets closely resembles ours, the Latin alphabet, with a few differences here and there, mostly letters with accents.  However, everybody knows that many languages globally are written in different alphabets. Some, like Greek and Russian, share a few characters and look a bit like ours, while others, like Chinese and Hindi, are written in script that does not at all resemble our English alphabet.

 

Translating most texts between languages with different alphabets is a linguistic issue, however, translating names of persons, locations and places can be a peculiar challenge.

 

That is because a lot of transliteration has changed in the last few decades. Case in point, Mao Tse Tung became Mao Zedong, Bombay became Mumbai, Alma Ata, Almaty, etc. There has been little change in Japanese transliteration: Nakamura is still Nakamura, Nagoya, Nagoya, so on, so forth. That is because Japanese is a syllabic language.

 

Transliterating a simple person’s name in alphabets that resemble ours can be a nightmare. For instance, when I was writing a book on car racing in the 70s, the last name of a Greek driver appeared spelled in four different ways in non-Greek literature, so it was up to me to choose a transliteration.

 

In immigration cases this can have devastating outcomes. Whenever I receive a document written in a different alphabet I ask the client to provide the spelling appearing in US visas, passports and the like. Believe it or not, a simple “iy”, “ye” or “ii” ending can cause all types of trouble for a client.

For more information http://birthcertificatetranslated.com